Dorothea Helen Gray met the world on Jan. 9, 1929, in Redlands, Calif., the sixth of seven children born to Jesse James Gray and Trudie Gray. I have read books and hundreds of news articles and file after file of court records related to her crimes. She created a fake persona, calling herself "Teya Singoalla Neyaarda", a Muslim woman of Egyptian and Israeli descent. Puente surrendered quietly. Dorothea Puente's House Has Been Bought. In addition to the usual fare sold in the halls chow line, there are heart-shaped boxes of chocolates for $7. [citation needed]. After their deaths she continued to draw their social security cheques. I rise as she approaches and shake a hand that feels skeletal and small. In any case, after more than 20 years behind bars, and despite the withering of her features, she retains a physical vitality and a fondness for cosmetic excess. I think they needed somebody and I was the easiest one around., Yet the most illuminating aspect of talking with Puente in prison arises from her silence about the dead. She answers without pause. Puente was found guilty of the murders of 64-year-old Dorothy Miller, 55-year-old Benjamin Fink, and 78-year-old Leona Carpenter. During the 1992 proceeding, investigators revealed that Puente - who was then 63 - had been killing the tenants for money, making $4,000 a month from cashing their social security checks. Puente died in prison at Chowchilla on March 27, 2011, from natural causes; she was 82. I am led to believe if there is any reason for us to be living here on this Earth, it is to somehow enhance one another's humanity, to love, to touch each other with kindness, to know that you have made just one person breathe easier because you have lived. She was the sixth of seven children but didnt grow up in a stable family environment. An undercover cop posing as a trucker arrested her after she offered to perform fellatio on him; she served 90 days in county lockup. At age 16, she drifted off on her own to Olympia, Wash. Comely and flaxen-haired, with soft blue eyes and a beguiling smile, she worked as a prostitute to earn money and caught the attention of Fred McFaul. He remains convinced of her innocence, arguing that her crimes were limited to filching the benefits checks of her tenants. 'We had a real connection,' Harder told VICE. A year earlier, he had probed the case of Morris Solomon, a Sacramento handyman who would be convicted of murdering six women across the city. Cooking what I want. A dark thought arrived. I was on stage when the girl next to me broke her heel and bumped into me. Cabrera, lead detective on the Puente case, stands with the shovel that she lent to law officers to dig in her backyard on Nov. 11, 1988. After what was then the longest deliberation in a murder case in state history24 daysthe jury convicted her of three killings. The three law officers had stopped by the house to try to learn the whereabouts of Alvaro Bert Montoya, who had gone missing three months earlier. Ruth was not just Puente's friend but was also her business partner and had moved in with her just three weeks before the murder. Slight and demure, with her ivory-white hair and solicitous demeanor, the landlady resembled any other elderly woman with a kitchen full of pots and pans and a cat calendar hanging next to the stove. Betty Palmer, 78. A couple who braved the stigma of the house's curse purchased the home, fully aware of the history. Serial killer Dorothea Puente poisoned seven people in her boarding house and buried them in the backyard. Four days later, Munroe died at Puentes home. As jury foreman Mike Esplin recalls, the man simply said, Thats all Im going to give. Puentes composure cracked after the last verdict was read. Today the 59-year-old Cabrera works cold cases for the department as a retired sergeant. Dismembering their corpses, she threw their remains into a mass grave in her garden, telling neighbors the foul smell emanating from the ground was sewage and dead rats, rather than dead residents. For five days, Dorothea Puente was on the lam. The house at 1426 F Street, now painted a shade of gingerbread, appears occupied on the first floor and empty on the second, where she used to sleep. Well regarded for taking in substance abusers and the homeless, she had earned respect in political circles for her charity work. The guards will come by and go, What you got cooking today? , She marks much of the day reading mind-candy fictionshes a fan of John Grisham and Dan Brownand watching TV; her favorite prime-time shows include CSI, Criminal Minds and Cold Case. They separated in 1969, and not long after, Dorothea, who had briefly run an unauthorized rehab program for alcoholics, opened a boardinghouse at 21st and F streets. Cabreras superiors approved her request, deciding they held insufficient evidence to detain her. Puente had stayed poised a day earlier when Cabrera showed up with a fellow homicide detective and a federal probation agent. Years later, her granddaughter visits the spot. Cops hauling away body bags. Next, Dorothea Puente went to San Francisco, where she married her second husband, Axel Bren Johansson, in 1952. Dorothea Puente after her arrest in Los Angeles, en route back to Sacramento. Seven bodies were eventually found buried on the property.[10]. She collected tenants' monthly mail before they saw it and paid them stipends, pocketing the rest for "expenses". A person like her, the retired sergeant says, theres no forgetting. (Photo by Jeremy Sykes). When attempts to extract it with a shovel failed, Cabrera climbed into the hole. Despite lacking formal dance training, she says, I went out there and they hired me. One-time hitman Julio Santana (right) stopped counting after he reached 492 kills. There are so many sad stories in here. The only time they were in good health was when they stayed at my home. A year later her mother died in a motorcycle accident. Somehow a neighbor got suspicious, when the police officers investigated the house, the back yard, at least five bodies were buried in her back yard! The unreliable narrator breaks the hush. (Details of reports on such incidents are not public record.) His head cocked to the side, he looks back at her, preparing to usher her past the crowd that looms outside the frame. I dont know what to tell you, she said. She was notoriously known as the "Death House Land Lady" after committing nine murders. I wonder what she wants when death does come. Me and Nancy, Puente says, shaking her head, we never got along. (A similar epitaph could apply to her marriage to her fourth husband, Pedro Montalvo, who left her in 1976, the same year they exchanged vows in Reno. An officer dispatched to the house that morning interviewed Puente and one of her tenants, John Sharp. She answers with a look of mild reproach that pulls taut her soft fist of a face. Through her early teen years, young Dorothea found herself handed off to a series of relatives and foster homes, bouncing between Napa and Los Angeles, court records reveal. As it happened, her shovel was used to dig the hole that yielded a human leg bone, a decomposed foot inside a dark dress shoe and what looked like pieces of tattered fabric that in fact were rotting flesh. Puente sah aus wie die Gromutter aus der Nachbarschaft, aber in Wirklichkeit war sie eine kaltbltige Mrderin. She folds the towel several times into a tight square before clasping her hands together on her lap like a child attending Mass. With Jeff Rechner, Joelle Uzyel, Mikel Welch. During my meetings with Puente, a number of prisoners softly greet herHi, Miss Dorothea; How are you, Miss D?as they walk past. See that one? she asks, nodding toward a gaunt, gray-haired woman with stooped posture. Their relationship developed quickly, and the couple was soon making wedding plans. And she didnt buy Puentes explanation that hed left on vacation. Sacramento Co. By Remy Millisky / March 14, 2022 11:13 am EDT. Here are 5 things you may not know about Dorothea Puente: 1. She trails Cabrera, his police badge clipped to the front of a dark blue jacket and his jeans tucked into knee-high black boots that he had donned for the days dig. [citation needed], Granting a change of venue motion filed by Puente's lawyers, Kevin Clymo and Peter Vlautin III, a judge transferred the trial to Monterey County. Under the law, Puente received life without the possibility of parole. Driven by routine, Puente rises by 4:30 a.m. most days, long before her seven cellmates. [11], Puente has been featured on numerous true crime television shows, including Crime Stories,[12] Deadly Women,[13] A Stranger in My Home,[14] World's Most Evil Killers,[15] and Worst Roommate Ever.[16]. I ask why the cops targeted her. [citation needed], On November 11, 1988, police inquired after the disappearance of tenant Alvaro "Bert" Montoya, a developmentally disabled man with schizophrenia, who had been reported missing by his social worker. Thats between me and my God., Until 2006, Puente rotated through assorted prison jobs, cleaning cells, giving haircuts, toiling on a landscaping crew. After the notorious female serial killer Dorothea Puente died in prison at the age of 82, the filmmaker Nick Coles stumbled upon her obituary. [10] According to investigators, most of her victims had been drugged until they overdosed; Puente then wrapped them in bed-sheets and plastic lining before dragging them to open pits in the backyard for burial. 22 ratings3 reviews. She steams the tamales in plastic bags placed in a pan of water warmed with two electric immersion coils. My question about the incident draws an explanation akin to the one Puente gave a county judge nearly a half century earlier: I was there visiting a friend when the cops came. She refuses to elaborate. The serial killer shuffles into the room with a chickens hitched gait. Dick Schmidt/Sacramento Bee/Tribune News Service via Getty Images. How Did Dorothea Puente Kill Her Victims? The serial killer shuffles into the room with a chickens hitched gait. I get pushed in a wheelchair. She speaks in clipped sentences, her voice, so rarely shared with journalists, scratchy but strong. On subjects unrelated to her misdeeds, she will open up, weaving anecdotes that are sometimes embroidered, sometimes made from whole cloth. One girl was placed in the care of relatives, the other put up for adoption. In November 1985, Dorothea Puente hired a handyman named Ismael Florez to install some wood paneling in her home. After spending part of Valentines Day with Miss Dorothea, as other inmates call her, I returned later in February and stopped by for a final chat in April. In late 1981, his mother, Ruth Munroe, went into business with Puente, leasing and running the restaurant side of the Round Corner Tavern in midtown. The theory, while perhaps logical to anyone unfamiliar with Puente before her name hit the headlines, brought disparate reactions from those who already knew her. The 1991 film Evil Spirits, starring Karen Black and Arte Johnson, is loosely based on the Puente murders. Her father died of tuberculosis when Dorothea was 8; her mother, an alcoholic who alternated between abusing and deserting her children, lost custody of them in 1938. It is a stifling backdrop in which to live out the years. I watch the scenes unfold from table No. Barring an unexpected transfer to another prison or a medical emergency, she will die inside this compound. The lone drug present in all of them was Dalmane, a sedative for which Puente had obtained more than three dozen prescriptions of 30 pills each between October 1985 and November 1988, according to court records. We both fell into the orchestra pit and I broke my leg. The other dancer? Hed been referred to Dorothea Puentes house because of her sterling reputation welcoming people like him. It is a wistfulness that lays bare the depth of chaos that defined Puentes status quo long before they married in 1952. The three men carried shovels as they fanned out across the backyard of the two-story Victorian at 1426 F Street. Prosecutors said that Puente was one of the most cold and calculating female killers the country had ever seen.. Puente's total count reached nine murders; she was convicted of three and the jury hung on the other six. She killed her husband after he abused her and her kids. A Latino woman with shoulder-length dark hair passes our table and whispers hello to Miss Dorothea. Her body shapeless under a long-sleeve T-shirt and dungarees, she has pulled back her snowy plume of hair with a pink scrunchie. Police and forensics experts swarmed Puentes property the next morning. That didnt seem right, but Dorothea had conned our whole family into thinking she was a nurse.. He claims to have had a regular relationship with her, The Founder of MurderAuction, a website that sells serial killer memorabilia, Harder says he sees his grandmother as human, despite her crimes (pictured: Harder with cult leader Charles Manson). Marathon Man 63m Some months earlier, another tenant, a longtime alcoholic on a bender, had vanished after Puente went to his room to make him feel better. The acrid stench of rotting flesh soon spread through the home and beyond, an odor she blamed on sewer problems and that drew complaints from neighbors. In the 1980s, she ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, and murdered various elderly and mentally disabled boarders before cashing their Social Security checks. She married Roberto Puente in 1968, but the relationship dissolved sixteen months later. She came on a little hard, what with her questions about his Social Security benefits and abrupt suggestion that they consider living together. Finally, four days after she skipped town, authorities traced her to a tumbledown motel in Los Angeles. In the 70s, while running her first boardinghouse at 21st and F streets, Puente cultivated a strong rapport with social workers. She changed her public image to that of a respectable older matron by putting on vintage clothing, wearing large granny glasses, and letting her hair turn gray. Montoya struggled with mental health issues and had been homeless for years. It is late March and after midnight, the hour when shepossibly with the help of an unsuspecting Montoya or another accomplice, a mystery police never solvedburied bodies in the yard. Police later accused Puente of lacing food or drinks she served her victims with a lethal mix of prescription drugs, poisoning them to collect their Social Security checks, a scheme that netted more than $5,000 a month. Cops hauling away body bags. SPECIAL TO THE TIMES. One was missing its head, hands and feet. [9], Puente continued to accept elderly boarders and was popular with local social workers because she accepted referrals of the "tough cases", including drug addicts and abusive tenants. [8], Puente told Florez to stop while they were on Garden Highway in Sutter County and dump the box of "junk" on the riverbank at an unofficial household junk dumping site. She played the stoic in court, her face as frozen as her mug shot. These people were human beings, they had a right to live-they did not have a lot of possessions-no houses-no cars-only their social security checks and their lives. Not yet considering the sweet lady to be a suspect, the officers obliged at the 59-year-old's request to go down the street to buy a cup of coffee - but she had no intention of returning. The infamous home Dorothea Puente lived in is along F Street in Sacramento. She gave them clothing, she gave them food. Following her year-long trial which ended in 1993, Dorothea was convicted on three counts of murder and was. For years, the disappearances of these so-called shadow people who lived at the margins of society went unnoticed. In her note, written on plain lined paper in a grade-schoolers swirling cursive, she invited me to visit. Her upstanding reputation concealed a habit of forging the signatures of tenants on their benefits checks before signing them over to herself. Instead, after buying the coffee, she fled immediately to Los Angeles, where she befriended an elderly male pensioner whom she had met in a bar. He escorted her out of the propertys wrought-iron front gate, a moment captured in a photo lying on the conference table. Puente watched the images flicker across the TV screen in her Los Angeles motel room. I have also done this: Late at night, when it is said her deeds turned darkest, I have pondered the vastness of human nature as I stood outside the tiny yard where she buried her victims. Dorothea Puente, a notorious, grandmotherly boarding house operator convicted in the 1990s of killing her tenants, has died in prison aged 82. [1] Puente's total count reached nine murders; she was convicted of three and the jury hung on the other six. During the initial investigation, Puente was not immediately a suspect, and she was allowed to leave the property, ostensibly to buy a cup of coffee at a nearby hotel. Then you will understand why these people believe Dorothea's life is worth saving. It wasnt until 1988 that suspicions first arose about Puente, after one of her tenants, 52-year old Alvaro Montoya, went missing. ), Thanks to her ties to Reagan, Puente tells me, she met Vice President Spiro Agnew and U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston, and in the mid-70s, she ate dinner with longtime Republican booster Clint Eastwood when he visited town. But as the police prepared to leave, Sharp slipped them a message. Multiple murder suspect Dorothea Montalvo Puente, right, is brought back to Sacramento from the LA area in the early morning hours of November 17, 1988. Maybe I would have been better off. A lot of people get old in here really quickly cause they just kind of stop doing anything., Ruth Munroe, believed by authorities to be Puentes first victim (Courtesy of The Sacramento Archives). I didnt drug anyone. A gentle bear of a man, the 52-year-old Montoya suffered from untreated psychosis, a condition that for years had consigned him to the streets and homeless shelters. Would you want that to happen to your children? Social workers in the 1970s looked upon Dorothea Puente and her boarding house with admiration. One was missing its hands, head and feet. For the rest of her life, she maintained her innocence, insisting that all of her boarders had died of "natural causes". I dont give a shit what anyone else thinks., Did you like what you read here? Puente continued to collect Gillmouth's pension and wrote letters to his family, explaining that the reason he had not contacted them was because he was ill. She continued to maintain a boarding house, taking in forty new tenants. Isabel Vincent. Her eyes fix on the mural of Winnie the Pooh. Being escorted to a police car after her capture in 1988, serial killer Dorothea Puente told gathering reporters 'I used to be a very good person, at one time'. She sat there so totally motionless and emotionless, says Honey Hewlett, one of 12 jurors seated for the trial, who stopped buying Giorgio perfume after learning Puente also wore the scent. I want to know what stopped her from killing herself. 13, as designated by the plastic placard atop its faux-wood surface. Grandson of killer granny Dorothea Puente, who laced cakes with sleeping pills and then smothered them at her California boarding house, reveals how he shared a 'real connection' with her and. Between 1982 and 1988, the elderly and disabled people living in Dorothea Puentes house had no idea that was she was poisoning and strangling some of her guests before burying them on her property and cashing their Social Security checks. A contrary perception derived from Puentes strong ties to Hispanic residents living in downtown and midtown. Hard living had stolen much of Dorotheas youthful beauty by the time she landed her third husband in 1968 and settled in Sacramento. They wanted to question her about Bert Montoya, her onetime tenant who had been reported missing. With age and health concerns relieving her of work duty, she considers her self-assigned morning chores, attending chapel and other diversions a means of survival. The two then separated, with McCauley returning downtown and Puente taking another cab to Stockton, where she hopped a bus to Los Angeles. Prison persuades some inmates to repent, their perspective evolving with time as they forsake their younger selves. She was the sixth of seven children, all of whom struggled in a less-than-stable family environment, with little income and love to speak of in the Gray house. Arrested for the scam in 1978, court records show, she received five years federal probation, the terms of which proscribed her from operating a boardinghouse. Dorothea Puente is an American serial killer. The jokes on me. I watch as she pushes away the empty plastic container of fried chicken strips and french fries that she finished eating earlier. In her telling, after showering and dressing, she prays, recites the rosary and reads a few pages of the Bible, favoring Proverbs and Romans. A 22-year-old soldier who had returned to the U.S. from the Pacific after World War II, he married Dorothea in 1945, and they moved to Gardnerville, Nevada to start a family. Puente and McCauley had caught a cab from the Clarion Hotel to a West Sacramento bar. The inmates know who she is, the official says. Jodi Picoult mentions Puente's crimes and cookbook in her novel House Rules. Theyve never talked to me. On another occasion, she casts her circumstance in a biblical light. For William Clausen, by contrast, the bodies buried in Puentes yard confirmed what he already considered fact: she killed for profit. I scan the room out of empty impulse, certain I havent missed her. That is a human quality that deserves to be preserved. Dalmane, which is a drug used for insomnia, was found in all seven of the exhumed bodies. Despite being convicted of murder in 1993 and sent to prison, Puente. After several days of deliberations, the jury was deadlocked 75; Judge Michael J. Virga declared a mistrial when the jury said further deliberations would not change their minds. Our visit winds down. Ive given up hope of getting out, she says. She was given five years' probation and ordered to pay $4,000 in restitution. Back in Sacramento, police were digging up five more bodies, including Bert Montoyas. That is the question. Amanda Sedlak-Hevener. Thats when the gray door clanks open once more. Unbeknownst to Puente, the pensioner recognized her as the woman he saw on television news reports. Everybodys heard of me. I ask why shes here. Now she watched from her second-story porch as the trio began to dig. I now see them as tokens of loneliness, trifles to mark the time. In another twist to the case, Sacramento police escorted her back to the city on a plane chartered by KCRA for its news crew. [19] It was then the subject of the 2015 documentary short The House Is Innocent and was again opened to tours for one day in conjunction with a local film festival's showing of the film.[20]. I made them change their clothes every day, take a bath every day and eat three meals a day When they came to me, they were so sick, they werent expected to live.. Then there was the riddle of Puente. A man identifying himself as a talent scout for the Radio City Rockettes, the famed New York City dance troupe, sized her up and, on the spot, invited her to fly east for an audition. Her passivity subdues suspicion. [1] Sua contagem total chegou a nove assassinatos confirmados e seis no . and other board games that the prison makes available to visitors. At the same time, they agreed she had an evil side brought on by the stress of caring for her down-and-out tenants. How did I know where they were? Absolving herself, Puente fingers McCauley and another former tenant as the possible murder suspects. EXCLUSIVE: 'I killed JonBent Ramsey! Convicted pedophile Rose West's son breaks silenceto tell how his killer mother Isabel Oakeshott receives 'menacing' message from Matt Hancock, Insane moment river of rocks falls onto Malibu Canyon in CA, Mom who lost both sons to fentanyl blasts laughing Biden, Pavement where disabled woman gestured at cyclist before fatal crash, Pro-Ukrainian drone lands on Russian spy planes exposing location, 'Buster is next!' Dorothea Puente. She was tried for killing seven people by drugging them with Dalmane and alcohol. Shes dying of cancer. The checks I cashed, yes. In a cryptic aside, she added, I used to be a very good person at one time., The public heard little from Puente for more than 20 years after that clip aired. "I was hooked when I saw that she had published a. 'Executing Puente would be like executing your grandmother', one juror is reported to have said in response to the death sentence looming over the defendant at the time. To give strength to other people. She lifts the paper towel to her eyes. Speaking softly, she asked, Am I under arrest? When the detective told her no, she explained that the police presence and the growing mob of onlookers had her on edge. She does not smile, laugh or joke much in my presence, but nor does she betray malevolence. Dorothea Puente right before she fled Sacramento. Chief later dismantled a garage in the backyard and installed a fresh concrete slab there as well. For Puente, the distortions of her past have congealed into a personal reality that grows ever more fanciful. While there, doctors diagnosed her as a pathological liar with an unstable personality. (One woman later discovered checks and jewelry missing from her home; her case played a part in Puentes 1982 arrest on theft charges.) But volatility seemed to follow Puente wherever she went and the new couple argued frequently about Puentes drinking and gambling. Their theory hardened into subjective truth when they discovered that, following the funeral, the nurse had drained thousands of dollars belonging to Munroe from a joint business bank account. During their initial meeting, he encountered a woman of utter ordinariness, one far removed from the media caricature that depicted her as the embodiment of evil. Officers rushed to the hotel to arrest Puente, but by then, she had bolted. In the 1970s, she opened her first boarding house in Sacramento. I leave through a different door and make my way out of the prison, stepping into the cool afternoon air. Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray on January 9, 1929. Joy the last person to have seen her alive. The psychiatrist diagnosed Puente as suffering from antisocial personality disorder, a condition marked by deceit and manipulation of others without remorse. Its about a mile from my building to here, she says. She seems entirely harmless. Several were swaddled in bed sheets that matched linens found in the house. In April of 1982, a 61-year-old woman named Ruth Monroe moved into Dorothea Puentes house.
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